Failure to Merge by Micah Ruelle

–Traci Brimhall

“Micah Ruelle‘s Failure to Merge, an epistolary sequence, both adopts the persona of the major artery of America that is Highway I-35 and speaks back to it in a voice that is heartachingly raw, compassionate, and aggressively honest. The poems grapple with a country’s lack of justice and the speaker’s sense of personal loss—loss of love, of life, of a sense of spiritual reckoning. A homage to the places it traverses, notably Texas and the poet’s Midwestern homeland, Failure to Merge sees, listens, and recognizes the human urge to understand and empathize with what we are often taught is other. ‘This is the—my problem,’ she writes, ‘This is why / I think of heaven as clouds / & not stems in the hearty earth.’ As we travel with her via I-35, the speaker/poet’s unlikely spiritual guide, Micah Ruelle urges us to celebrate and investigate the land we call our own.”

–Jenny Molberg

Micah Ruelle‘s epistolary poems in Failure to Merge remind me of the dialogue we are constantly having with ourselves, that internal voice that speaks to us from the deepest core of our being. Here, the poet is in dialogue with the personified ventricle that cuts through the heart of the United States Interstate 35—and the exchange is full of humor, wisdom, and truth. By journey’s end, we learn to “listen more closely” to the sounds of the roads we choose to take, to our private heartbreaks, our private joys.

–Octavio Quintanilla